But now we all had this additional worry of Grandma disappearing at any hour of the day or night. We worried that she would be hit by a car, because she wandered in the street so intently involved with her inner rage that she paid no attention to cars. When Grandma fled, if Uncle Willy was home, he would go get her. He was the best at it. He sighed, and put on his shoes, and went out and followed after her with mild consoling words of the gentlest reproach. “Oh Mama,” he said, “come back, it’s getting chilly and you’ll catch cold. Come, Mama, no you don’t mean that, don’t say that, you know how sorry you feel afterwards when you talk that way. Come home, Mamaleh,” he said and held his hand out with the palm up, like a man extending an invitation to dance; and many blocks from Eastburn Avenue with her rage vented, and her curses cursed, she turned and allowed herself to be escorted home.
Naturally, the neighbors knew of our trouble. Children in the street got out of Grandma’s way, but were so fascinated they followed her at a safe distance. My mother’s mortification was intense. With Uncle Willy out in the middle of the street trying to lead Grandma back inside, my mother waited in the shadows beside the parlor window where she couldn’t be seen. She cried and shook her head and bit her lip. “What did I do to deserve this?” she muttered, not unlike Grandma. “God in heaven, what have we done to deserve this!”
And one night Grandma disappeared entirely and no one could find her. My father finally called the police. Hours went by. Nobody went to bed, not even me. Then a green-and-white police car pulled up to the curb in front of our house. Two policemen got out and opened the rear door, and gently assisted Grandma out of the car and up the front steps as if they were her footmen. She was quite docile. They told my father they had found her on a street bridge overlooking the New York Central tracks all the way over on Park Avenue.
There was some message to me in all of this that did not address itself to my rational being as a good boy. But all I knew consciously was that I was making mistakes of recklessness and getting into trouble. I was wild. I tore up my knees from running too fast and falling. My knees or my elbows recorded these events with scabs. I was rarely clear of them. One afternoon in my room I heard my brother coming home from school; I ran the length of the house down the hall to the front door. Donald was ringing the bell, I saw his shadow on the curtain; the door was glass-paned from its top to its bottom. Running, my hand outstretched for the doorknob, reaching, reaching, what could account for my excitement? Did I have something to tell him? Did I have some story about Pinky? Or was it only that I knew Donald coming home from school commenced the day’s action? My hand missed the knob and went through the glass door. I felt the slash of an inanimate evil. Without so much as the caesura of a drawn breath I was first shouting in joy, then screaming in shock. Pain tore through my hand, and the mess of my own red substance was on the curtain. My mother running from the back of the house, my brother calling her, the door opening, glass falling to the floor, I stood looking at my palm, blood pouring down my arm. Ripples of terror went through the community of my home, as each person had in turn to learn and respond to the awful event. I was being tourniqueted, washed, soothed, but at the same time an investigative procedure had been initiated, my mother searching from my brother’s answers to her questions the possibility of his having been responsible for this event, while he defended himself righteously, loudly and adeptly, and my grandmother was with her hand on her cheek coming along down the hall and shaking her head and saying “Gottenyu, Gottenyu,” thus suggesting the cosmic forces once again assailing us all. Pinky was furiously barking, and Uncle Willy, awakened from a nap on his day off, was simply trying to get the news of how this had happened, since nobody had taken the time to stop and tell him. Eventually, from the center of all of this, sobbing fitfully as I stood, hand extended for the operation over the bathroom sink, and winced as my mother removed shards of glass with a tweezer, I nevertheless found an inner certitude and calm, perhaps in advance of my willingness to stop crying or feeling sorry for myself. Everyone stood around me and watched. Thus the element of performance added itself to my behavior and I realized the advantage to my small being—the smallest lowest ranking voice in the family, in constant attendance to any one of this pantheon of powerful creatures I lived with, each with a different strength and call upon my loyalty, each entitled to tell me what to do and how to do it—I could not fail to realize the power residing in me at this moment. I was an instrument of fearful prophecy. More than that, I knew I had found the weakness of their adult strength and resolution—that misfortune could reach them through me. Even my grandma was diverted to total attention.
It is a heartening knowledge that comes sooner or later to all children that they can achieve parity. I had seen time and again in the streets a child hurting himself and then being spanked by his mother for hurting himself—pain added upon pain, which seemed cruel or stupid until it became clear that the mother intuited the malign exercise of the child’s act. She was being hurt and so she responded in kind. My mother did not ever hit me for hurting myself, not having the sufficient distance from me or cynicism to do so; there was too fine an appreciation in her for the eternal hazards given to consciousness, poor woman, here she was in the Depression, with her sick mother, her improvident brother, her two children, a yapping dog, and maintaining an entire family while in economic dependency to her unpredictable husband. To her my injury might save me from worse if it could be seen to be a lesson.
“All right,” she said, “stop that whimpering. It’s not so bad. Maybe you’ll know now not to run through the house like a maniac.”
In some emblematic measure of this sentiment my mother decided to tailor a wool suit for me. I endured many fittings before the thing was done. Early one afternoon of an autumn Sunday I emerged from our house all decked out in a camel-colored tunic and matched leggings and on my head a color-coordinated beret of dark brown. I could feel the grip of the elastic band on my forehead. The buttons on my tunic went all the way up to the neck, the top one tightly fastening the military-style collar. I felt contained. At the ankles of the leggings was a row of snaps, simulating spats. The leggings came down over the tops of my new tightly laced shoes of brown leather.
I rode up and down the sidewalks for a while on my tricycle. My father joined me a few minutes later and we had a catch in front of the setback garage doors next to our stoop. I lurched after the ball when I dropped it. I couldn’t move that well. Also I didn’t want to forget myself and fall and tear the new suit or get it dirty. As soon as my mother came out, we would head past P.S. 70, across 174th Street, and up the Eastburn Avenue hill to the Concourse, where we would take the bus to visit my father’s parents, my grandma and grandpa, who lived north of Kingsbridge Road. Donald was old enough not to have to go. It was a beautiful cold sunny day and I had to squint to see the ball coming at me. My father wore an overcoat open over his dark double-breasted suit and tie. His hat was set at the usually jaunty angle. We were waiting for my mother and then would be on our way.
At this moment an itinerant photographer came around the corner and walked toward us with a box camera on a tripod over his shoulder, and with a small pony trailing behind him. My father’s face lit up. “You’ve got a customer!” he called, waving at the man, and from one moment to the next my day turned bad, as if the sky had suddenly filled with dark clouds.
I didn’t want my picture taken. I didn’t want to get on the pony. It was a shaggy dull-eyed thing and I could see the breath coming out of its nostrils. I knew immediately it was a badly used animal with a cynical spirit. But this was the kind of fortuitous event that made my father happy. Life declared itself in him. “It’s just the thing, just the thing!” he said. I disagreed. We exchanged views. The unctuous photographer felt privileged to join the argument on my father’s side, saying the pony loved to have children sit on his back. I knew his game. Finally my father could contain himself no longer. He lifted me under the arms and set me on the pony’s back, m
y legs split wide over the saddle. I felt the pony stomp and stir about. The saddle seemed to me loose and creaking. The pony whinnied and took a step or two. My father was holding one hand on my back and holding the reins with the other while the man busily set up his camera. I felt the shuddering animal life of the pony between my legs, I had never sat on a horse before and I would not stick my feet in the stirrups. “Get me down!” I shouted, and I put up such a fight, squirming and sliding and threatening to fall by my vehement twistings and kickings, that the pony started to clip-clop about, turning in circles on the sidewalk. The photographer now tried to soothe him, patting his neck and gripping his mane, and my father, holding me under the arms and not lifting me off, said, “You’re all right! Don’t you see you’re all right? This little pony is more frightened of you than you are of him. Stop shouting so, stop screaming, you’re all right, nothing to be afraid of, come on, you can do it, give it a try.”
There I was, buttoned down and collared in the tight, almost suffocating fit of my mother’s vision, and my father was urging me to heights of daring and adventure.
I thought in my desperation of a compromise. I would permit my picture to be taken, but on my tricycle, not on the pony.
I still have that picture. My little hands clutch the handlebars. My feet rest on the block pedals of the oversized front wheel. I am in my matching jacket and leggings of stiff wool. The beret is only slightly askew. I am allowing my adorable self to be commemorated in his new outfit. I am a good-looking open-faced towheaded child and I am smiling as I have been instructed; but it is a tentative wary little smile, my deportment in life, ready to placate, appease, if that will work, but my foot on the pedal, ready to fly me away, if it doesn’t.
It wasn’t as if I weren’t eager to learn their ways and take the instruction I was given and assume my place in life. But each of my deities spoke from a different strength and to different aspirations. All around me was the example of passionate survival, but I could never be sure, as I held in me the conflicting arguments of how it was done, what was the margin for error, the tolerance for wrong moves.
NINE
Extending from my mother and father were two family wings, unequal in strength, making our flight erratic. My grandma and grandpa on my father’s side were not people of means, living in a three-room apartment a few miles to the north of us. But they were whole, complete, they took pride in themselves and their children—my father being one of three, the others my aunts Frances and Molly—and they had clear views on most things. We rode up there on the red-and-black Concourse bus, which had a long engine hood and doubled rear wheels and spare tires chained to the back and torturously shifted gears. I enjoyed the ride, but once it was over, I had the visit to get through. Not that I didn’t love my grandma and grandpa; they were warm little old people who beamed at me and pressed food upon me, and kisses. But there was danger there.
My grandma liked to put out a lace tablecloth on the big dark table in their dining-living room. She served tea in her good china with its pale green and white sliced-apple motif, and also Uneeda crackers and homemade plum jam with cloves in it and a big cut-glass bowl of fruit, and a smaller bowl of pistachio nuts. Most often too we brought cake from a bakery. And everyone sat around the table and talked. My grandfather had a wonderful way of paring an apple, with his own pocketknife, so that the peel came off in one continuous strip. Sometimes, one or the other of my aunts was there but without my cousins, who, like my brother, were old enough to get out of such visits. So there was nothing to do. I stared through the double windows into the courtyard. My grandparents lived in the back of a house, off the street, and I found myself looking at opaque lace curtains or drawn shades. I sat under the big table radio in the corner of the room next to my grandfather’s favorite chair and tried to find something interesting to listen to—not too easy in the middle of a Sunday afternoon when the New York Philharmonic seemed to be the brightest choice. Or I wound up the big console Victrola in their bedroom and put pennies or nutshells on the spinning turntable and watched them fly off. Sometimes I leafed through a picture book I had brought along, sometimes I browsed through my grandfather’s bookcase in the foyer beside the front door. He owned many books, some of them in Russian. They were stuffed in, every which way. Each shelf had its own glass door that lifted up from the bottom and slid back under the shelf above. But there were so many books the doors wouldn’t slide. From my grandfather I first heard the names Tolstoy and Chekhov. He owned sets too—uniform editions, such as The World’s Great Orations and the Harper’s Picture Encyclopedia of the Civil War. I liked to look at the steel engravings of the Army of the North doing battle with the Army of the South. Each scene was protected by the thinnest sheet of paper.
Another diversion was the dumbwaiter in the kitchen. My grandmother let me open the little door in the wall and poke my head into the black air shaft. Odors of ash and garbage rose on the cold black air. A thick rope bisected the column of darkness. I could pull on this rope and bring into view the wooden box on which the tenants delivered their garbage to the superintendent.
My grandmother hobbled busily about, she was a bent woman with glasses and thin yellow-white hair, which she kept parted in the middle, braided, and tightly coiled in a bun. Her eyes watered and her hands were palsied, but her afflictions didn’t seem to daunt her. She bustled around to great effect and never sat still. She was in charge. My grandfather by contrast was a very slow-moving, slow-talking, gentle, slight man, with thick grey hair cut close; he was partial to a tan cardigan sweater, which he wore always over a white shirt and tie, brown pants and house slippers. He smoked odd oval-shaped cigarettes, Regents, which came out of a grey-and-maroon box. He liked me to press my palm against his and measure our hands; this was the way he kept track of my growth, he said. My growth was a matter of enormous pleasure to him. Invariably he was encouraged to find my hand had increased in size since our previous measurement. He patted me on the back of my neck. He was a retired printer. He had emigrated from Russia as a young man from the Minsk district—this had been the old country too of my grandmother. Apparently they had known each other as children, but only after they had come separately to America did they renew their acquaintance, conduct a courtship and marry. It was a matter only of momentary fascination to me to imagine my dear old grandfather Isaac as an erect black-haired young man, even younger than my father; to imagine him, for instance, lifting my father in his arms as my father sometimes did me. My father called him Papa. I did not dwell on these paradoxes. I think I did not entirely believe in them. Besides, my grandfather spoke so philosophically from such thoughtful distances of wisdom that no fanciful illusion could be maintained for very long about his being anything else but a grandfather. He told me that three times, in three separate presidential elections, he had cast his ballot for someone named William Jennings Bryan. Yet he was a socialist and came of a generation of enlightened Jewish youth who understood, as Bryan did not, that religion was a means of holding people in ignorance and superstition and therefore submissive to impoverishment and want. I did not really understand what he told me; but as he repeated these ideas and phrases over time, I was comfortable with their sentiments and was finally able to identify him as a critic of prevalent beliefs. He was in opposition—that I understood. In his bookcase were authors whose names were familiar to me before I knew who they were or what they stood for: Ralph Ingersoll, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Herbert Spencer. Although my grandmother was pious, and kept a kosher home, my grandfather was an atheist. He treasured a book by Thomas Paine called The Age of Reason, and used its arguments, and some of his own, to tease my grandmother and point out to her the absurdities and contradictions in her literal readings of the Old Testament. “‘My own mind is my own church,’” he said, quoting Paine. Yet, as she proudly told us even in her irritation with him, he had read the entire Bible many times and knew it better, God help him, the atheist, than she did.
So this was a substa
ntive household, an establishment in history next to which my mother’s poor dependent half-mad Mama in her widow’s weeds was no match. Nor my hapless, self-effacing formerly famous uncle Willy. You had to go see my father’s mother and father. They had a home. They were progenitors not only of my father but his two sisters—the elder, my aunt Frances, and the younger, my aunt Molly. And each of these ladies in her way had much to contribute to my sense of this family’s complexity. My aunt Frances was married to a successful lawyer and lived in Pelham Manor, in Westchester County, a Christian community over the city line. Aunt Frances not only owned a car but knew how to drive it, which was quite unusual for a woman. When she drove she wore white gloves. She was very gracious and soft-spoken and naturally dignified, like my grandfather; her two sons were at Harvard. My father’s younger sister, Molly, by contrast had her mother’s earthy practical ways. Molly was in addition a comedienne, an irreverent, brassy, unkempt woman, as blowsy as her sister was well groomed, Molly smoked cigarettes, whose ashes invariably dropped on the bosom of her dress. She squinted in the cigarette smoke. She read a newspaper my father thought a terrible rag—the Daily Mirror—because its coverage of horse racing was the best in the city and because it featured a columnist, Walter Winchell, whom she adored. She played the horses, as did her husband, Phil, a cabdriver. They had one daughter, my older cousin Irma. When the whole family was gathered in my grandparents’ small apartment on a Sunday afternoon, the two old people spoke English with strong inflections of Yiddish, Frances spoke in the cultivated tones of an upper-class Westchester matron, and Molly in a heavy Bronx accent. Somewhere in the middle of this mélange of styles and meld of social intention stood my father. His older sister had done well, and his younger had rebelliously married beneath her. His was the fate not yet decided. When it came to my father the stakes were high. He was the one son. Would Frances turn out to be the family exception or would Molly? It was not only his own destiny that was at issue but the final judgment still to be made of all of them.
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